A Jay elementary class uses baseball cards to teach mathematics.

JAY – On Friday, 10-year-old Josh Reil didn’t care the least bit that Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa was suspended for eight games by Major League Baseball after cork was found in his shattered bat earlier this week.

Reil was too busy staring in awe at Slammin’ Sammy’s rookie card, which materialized out of an old pack of 1990 Fleer baseball cards Friday morning at the Jay Elementary School.

And as the wide-eyed fourth-grader was adding up the value of all the cards in his deck, including the $10 Sosa card, he was unknowingly learning about mathematics and having fun all the while.

Baseball is a game of numbers: slugging percentages, batting averages, earned run averages, wins, losses, home runs and runs batted in.

And what better way to teach kids math skills than with stacks of cards featuring the mugs of the heroes of the nation’s pastime? For 36-year-old Troy True, a Jay High School graduate who now lives in Durham, there is none.

A die-hard Red Sox fan, True started collecting cards at age five. One card at a time turned into one pack at a time turned into one box at a time. Now, he gets cases of foil wrapped cards delivered to his home and his collection is estimated at 500,000 cards.

Baseball cards were a saving grace for him as a student, True admits. “Sports cards helped my math skills tremendously. It’s a different approach to math and it’s a fun approach.”

For every homer Sosa has hit in his lifetime, there is a math-related activity that can be done with baseball cards from adding up the prices of each card to see how much the entire collection is worth to figuring the percentage the card increases in value each year.

And for upper level mathematicians, the physics of a perfect pitch can also be number-crunched.

Cards and baseball also can be used to teach geography, by having students look up player’s hometowns or the locations of ball fields.

If nothing else, collecting cards can also teach responsibility, True said, urging the roomful of fourth-graders to carefully store the cards he gave them in plastic sleeves.

As each student shuffled wildly through their cards, trying to find the coveted Sosa card, “oohs” and “ahhs” buzzed through the room. Cards featuring Red Sox players of the past got held high, while players featuring the Bronx Bombers quickly were cast aside.

Students agreed it was a great math class.

“I felt very excited,” Reil admitted after discovering the Sosa card at the bottom of his stack. It will make a nice edition to his collection, which already has more than 100 baseball cards, he said. Sosa is his favorite player.

“I just can’t believe it. This is the best math class ever and the best day ever,” he said, still waving the card around with the energy Ted Williams once had up at the plate. “Card collecting is really cool, you can get a lot of money.”


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